Cultivated Compendium

According to Food Safety News, U.S. District Court Judge B. Lynn Winmill has allowed parts of a challenge to Idaho's ag-gag law to proceed, including a claim that it violates the First Amendment: "'Laws that restrict more protected speech than necessary violate the First Amendment,' Winmill wrote. 'Because this question of whether section 18-7042 burdens more speech that necessary remains unanswered, the court will not dismiss (Animal Legal Defense Fund’s) First Amendment claim.'"

The U.S. Supreme Court is being asked to consider whether the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act chills animals rights demonstrations, writes Jamie Schuman of Supreme Court Brief (the federal law prohibits anyone from intentionally causing the loss of money or property to an institution using animals). While the court ruled in Clapper v. Amnesty International that harm must be "certainly impending" for plaintiffs to get standing, the Center for Constitutional Rights, counsel for the five animal-rights activists bringing the challenge, argues the activists have standing because they have an objectively reasonable fear that the government will use the law to punish their speech, Schuman further reports. CCR wants the Supreme Court to grant certiorari, vacate the lower court opinion and remand the case without oral argument as the high court did in another pre-enforcement challenge to a criminal statute. The justices declined to apply Clapper in the case, Schuman also reports.

Computerworld's Jaikumar Vijayan writes that pressure is mounting on the Federal Aviation Administration to issue rules governing private drone use with Amazon and Google working on plans to use drones for commercial purposes and trade group Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International and other groups like media companies sharply criticizing the agency for moving slowly on rules to integrates drones into American airspace. The FAA is still more than a year away from releasing final rules, but a spokesman told Computerworld that the agency is on track to issue an intial draft of its rules before the end of the year.

Bert Brandenberg, executive director of Justice at Stake, has delved into the election of judges and the problems it poses for democracy. There have been record-breaking expenditures in races for the Tennessee Supreme Court ($1.4 million) and for the North Carolina Supreme Court ($1.3 million) this year: "Left unchecked, the tidal wave of judicial campaign cash will upend justice in America by pressuring courts to answer to political influence, by turning judges into fundraisers and by convincing disillusioned citizens that justice is for sale," he opines.

How did this come about? State supreme courts are now the battleground "in the nation’s long-running tort wars, pitting business interests, which are eager to limit damage awards, against plaintiffs and their allies, who contend that big-dollar judgments are critical to holding negligent businesses accountable," Brandenberg further argues.

Jeff Bennion, writing in Above the Law, has a helpful post about the lessons lawyers can learn from the leaked nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence that were apparently hacked out of her iCloud account: "Celebrities with nude photos in their cloud accounts are targets for the same reason lawyers with confidential client files in cloud accounts are: they are easy targets with highly bribable files. Lawyers are mostly clueless when it comes to cybersecurity, yet they use it to store their most valuable information." Bennion suggests that lawyers encrypt their files kept on the cloud in zip files, empty the trash in their cloud storage and make file sharing links temporary. The risk of a data breach, he says, is losing current clients, future clietns and your reputation.

And here's an article I wrote a few months back about the risk hackers pose to law firm's data security: http://www.cultivatedcompendium.com/reporting/risk-hackers-corporate-ame...

The Nebraska Supreme Court heard oral arguments today over a constitutional challenge to the Keystone XL pipeline, the Journal Star reports.

The issues in the case include:

* whether a 2012 statute giving the governor authority to approve the route can be upheld; 

* whether three landowners have standing to challenge the law because their properties are near or would have been near the path of the pipeline route;

* whether the pipeline is a common carrier that only the state legislature and the Nebraska Public Service Commission are allowed to regulate and whether the legislation violated the state constitution "by allowing TransCanada, the company developing the Keystone XL pipeline, to bypass the state’s Public Service Commission and have its route reviewed by the Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality and approved by Gov. Dave Heineman," the Journal Star also reports.

A federal judge has ruled that BP acted with gross negligence and wilful misconduct regarding the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico four years ago, the Washington Post reports. That means the energy company could face fines up to $17 billion for Clean Water Act fines.

U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier ruled that BP was 67 percent at fault for the spill, drilling rig owner and operator Transocean was 30 percent at fault and oil services giant Halliburton was 3 percent at fault.

Transocean already settled its liability for $1.4 billion. This week, Halliburton agreed to spend $1.1 billion to settle claims against it, including claims for punitive damages brought by the commercial fishing industry, the Wall Street Journal reports. While Halliburton was not found grossly negligent by the judge, the settlement ensured Halliburton avoided the risk of higher damages if it had been.

In the next two parts of the government's court case against BP, the second part will determine the size of the spill and the third part will determine the final amount of the Clean Water Act and punitive fines, the Post also reports.

The Seventh Circuit ruled today that Indiana's and Wisconsin's bans on same-sex marriage are unconstitutional, the Associated Press reports. Judge Richard Posner, writing for the court, opined that “'the challenged laws discriminate against a minority defined by an immutable characteristic, and the only rationale that the states put forth with any conviction — that same-sex couples and their children don’t need marriage because same-sex couples can’t produce children, intended or unintended — is so full of holes that it cannot be taken seriously,'” the Wisconsin Gazette reports.

Yesterday, U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman, who sits in Louisiana, became the first judge to rule that a state-level ban on same-sex marriage was constitutional, the AP also reports. According to the news wire, Feldman opined that "gay marriage supporters failed to prove that the ban violates equal protection or due process provisions of the Constitution. He also rejected an argument that the ban violated the First Amendment by effectively forcing legally married gay couples to state that they are single on Louisiana income tax returns. Furthermore, states have the right to define the institution of marriage, Feldman wrote."

The federal government was before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit yesterday to defend the National Security Agency's collection of phone call metadata for millions of Americans in order to investigate foreign terrorism, the New York Law Journal's Mark Hamblett reports: [Assistant U.S. Attorney General Stuart] Delery said the case was governed by Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735 (1979), where the U.S. Supreme Court held that telephone users lack a Fourth Amendment privacy interest in the telephone numbers they dialed because they voluntarily give that information to their telephone company. [Alex] Abdo [of the American Civil Liberties Union] countered that the use of a pen register against a criminal suspect in the Smith case was a far cry from the mass accumulation of phone data on the chance it may be useful to derail a terror attack." U.S. District Judge William Pauley refused to grant an injunction against the surveillance, but two other district judges came to the opposite conclusion.

Detroit's future is in the hands of U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven W. Rhodes, the New York Times reports: If the judge "approves a blueprint drawn up by Detroit officials to eliminate more than $7 billion of its estimated $18 billion in debts and to invest about $1.5 billion into the city’s now dismal services, it will mark the beginning of the end of the nation’s largest-ever municipal bankruptcy. The outcome will set this troubled city’s new course for the coming decades, perhaps longer." Rhodes must decide if the plan is equitable, feasible and in the best interests of creditors, the Times also reports.